NOTE: this is one of the posts where it is much better to watch the video 😉
Hi Friends! I’ve made lots of videos using cutouts that I’ve cut on my digital cutter. I’ve made masks and stencils and cutouts that I layered together to make my own embossing plates, but it occurred to me that I have never shown you how I design my cutting shapes! So today I’m just going to try to give you a quick overview of how I go about that.
I start in Silhouette Studio because that is my favorite program to use for vector work. It’s quick and easy and gets the job done. I do not use automatic tracing, however in this case. Most of the vector based drawing programs have that capability, but I very rarely use it because I find they don’t do the best job. I start with pictures that I’ve taken on my phone or my camera and unfortunately I’m not the greatest photographer. My photos
usually not as crisp as I would like, and often there’s not a lot of contrast- especially in the sample I am using here. I started with a photo of a stonework piece that was on the side of a building or a plaque (I don’t really remember), in Granada, Spain. I love this image of the pomegranate (NOTE: Granada means pomegranate according to my daughter who I was visiting at the time). But there is very little differentiation between the foreground and background, and so automatic tracing would not work well here. So I’m going to trace it by hand.
I use the drawing tool in Silhouette Studio. Most vector based drawing programs have the same capability. I just find Silhouette Studio a little more intuitive- to my brain, at least.
I choose the drawing tool and I’m going to draw around the image, creating shapes along the way. There is an option for smoothing for the drawing tool, and it starts out pretty high. I always set that down much lower. Somewhere around 15 or 16%. That option controls the number of points the drawing with have- the more points the closer and tighter the shape will be to the original image. The fewer the points the smoother the drawing will be, but it may not be as detailed as the original. Vector based drawing draws with points and I’m going to get a lot of them, but we can tweak that as you’ll see as we go along.
Once I set the smoothing option, I take my drawing tool and I just start to go around the shape and you’ll see, oh my gosh, I am a terrible drawer- really, really bad, especially when it comes to round things, but you’ll see it’s not going to matter.
Note that I use a pen and tablet for this work. A mouse is doable, but just a lot more difficult.
I just get the basic shape and when I get back to the beginning of the shape where I started, I click over the black dot and it creates a closed shape. Then I can come to the shape tool and the first thing that I do is I decide what color I want the shape to be. For this first shape I created, I set the line style and fill to red.
Immediately you can tell my drawing is way off! You’ll also see if I fill it with a color, I can’t see what’s underneath to try and tweak it. Again that’s easily solved- just set the transparency of the fill color up higher so it’s more transparent. Now I can see my shape and I can see the underlying piece of art that I was trying to trace. The next step is to tweak the points.
There are two ways to get into the Point Editing too. You can click on the Edit Point tool itself and then on the shape, or you can use the Select tool and double click on the shape. There is a panel that will open (and in newer versions of Silhouette Studio, the same options that are on the panel will show up on the area at the top of the user interface.
The first thing that I do with this brand new shape in the Edit Points panel is click the button that looks like an S, which simplifies the shape. This leaves me with a lot less points. Yet even with less points, it’s still really bad 😉 .
Initially, I try to decide if I have any extraneous points. In this example I determine that one point is very far away from the edge. I could move it, but I decided that since I had a point above and below I didn’t really need that extraneous point for such a smooth, basic shape. In this case, I click on that point, and choose the X button in order to delete it. I then click on the point above it and see it’s set to a smooth point. If I click again on the smooth point button, it will reset the point to a smooth point. Generally, it will make the handles on the point a little bit more even and the handles will move in tandem so the shape at that point will appear smoother. I can either leave that point there and tweak the handles or move the point and tweak the handles. The shape in that area was still a little bit off, but it doesn’t have to be perfect.
I continue to go around to the points and decide whether I need the point? Or do I need to tweak the point? Or just get rid of a point. Sometimes I may need to add a point. In that case, just click on the line to add a new point. And that point can be moved or the handles tweaked, or changed to a smooth or corner point or a straight or curved point. I just keep going around until I get a shape somewhat close to what I want.
In the video I showed how to add points and change them to create additional shapes or part of a shape. For the most part, Silhouette Studio will create shapes/points that are smooth. With a smooth point, if I take a handle and move it, it’s going to move the other side of the handle in unison.
However, there are many times where I want them to be independent, and in that case the point needs to become a corner. Just click the button to make the point a corner, and you can move one handle and the other will not move along with it. Sometimes I decide, that I want to make my shape look a little bit different from the original and I can again change the points to make that happen. I can make shapes a little bit rounder and less oblong. Or maybe I want to add a bump out- so I can add a couple of points, keep them smooth or make them corners, pull the handles in or out, and change the original shape. Personally I do this more for scrollwork.
I continue creating shapes as a draw around different pieces of the image, and tweak those drawn shapes as I go. When I’m done, I have a bunch of different shapes, and usually I try to color like shapes with the same line and fill color. It’s easier then to determine how to group the shapes and then combine them to make new shapes. In the case of the leaves in the example, I traced the interior shapes and the exterior shapes. At first I may group like shapes together. Then later I can decide whether I need to create a compound path or weld shapes together (or some combination of each).
Usually I’ll save all the individual pieces, and especially if I’m doing scrolls because I’ll combine scroll pieces in different ways to create new scrolls.
In the video I selected leaves that had tracings/drawings of the exterior and separate tracings/drawings of the interior of the leaves. I selected the interior and exterior leaves and then I chose the command Object-> Make Compound Path. That command will basically subtract the interior pieces from the exterior shapes. In the example I was left with a vine with a bunch of leaves. I could combine those with the other pieces as well.
The other way to combine shapes is to weld them together. In that case you select two or more shapes and make sure parts of them overlap. Then choose the command Object-> Weld. Wherever the shapes overlap they will be joined together.
In the video I show a few examples of combining shapes, including demonstrating offsets to create a cutout shape vs a stencil.
When I am finished, I am left with either a cutout shape as in this example, or a stencil. Cutouts involve a lot more welding to combine shapes into one connected shape. Stencils usually are a single exterior shape, and interior shapes that are subtracted from the exterior through the use of Make Compound Path.
When the shape is finished I can cut it on my digital cutter. In many cases I will cut these types of shapes out of Yupo paper, and then layer 3 of them together, glue them in order to create my Yupo paper embossing plates or folders. Or if it is a stencil shape I can cut a single one unless I want to emboss that as well and then I do the same thing where I cut 3 and glue them together.
If I set the line and fill color of the final shape to black, besides cutting it with my digital cutter, I can also save it as a jpeg . With the jpeg image, I can print it on Transparency and use it to create a stamp with my stamp maker. Or I can print the image on a laser printer and foil it. There are lots of different things you can do with your images that you make yourself from your drawings or photographs. This allows you to create unique pieces that are copyright and royalty free!
Enjoy!
